PCIe x1 card for 1080i playback?

I am inheriting a Dell GX520 mini-tower (P4 - 3.2ghz) and would like to use it as a video server to feed my Mitsubishi 1080i tv with HD video content, mostly movies but maybe a few games. I know the onboard video on the Dell won’t support HD playback so I’m looking for a reasonably priced (under $100) video card. The Dell has a PCIe x1 bus so my choices are quite limited. Can anyone suggest a x1 card with DVI-I output that will do what I’m looking for?

Best Regards,

Marcel

Thanks for the informative reply!

I have PCI slots available so that's an option if GPU perfomance will be better than with the x1 slot. Which PCI cards would do the job? H.264 decoding would be nice but i can live without it in order to stay at my price point.

Best Regards,

Marcel

If it were me, I would dremel out the PCIe 1x slot and make it open ended. Then throw in an HD 2400/3450/4350 for a lot less than any PCI or PCIe-based GPU (although it's a travesty the PCIe 1x interface is so under-utilized and overpriced, even if things are getting a little better).

Example of open-ended PCIe 4x slot:


This is by far the riskiest solution proposed so far.

I also agree with Kyle, if you can get it to work it might be worth it, it's just a little riskier, however could well be worth it especially if you take your time, be careful and don't do any physical damage to the pins, etc, it should be fine to try.

Just be sure you can return the card if it ends up not working.

I would say if you can get it to work, then either a low profile GF9600GS or an HD4650 would be perfect for this. I would prefer the GF9600 for now since I haven't seen low-een low- profile HD46xx yet, and I wouldn't want much weight on that connector.

It will be a little limited, but not nearly as much as you'd think (1/16th). Tom's did an article a while back (March 07) about scaling, here are the results:
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 572-8.html

Keep in mind that is with a 975X motherboard which has PCIe 1.1 lanes, the HD 4650 has PCIe 2.0 lanes (so does your P45 mb) which have twice the bandwidth per lane. Also the 8800 is a more powerful GPU than the 4650, the X1900 is probably on par with it.

Edit: Here's the newer article that uses PCIe 2.0, and the 3850 is slightly more powerful than a 4650 (DDR3 version).

Probably something like this:
http://www.dremel.com/en-us/Attach [...] x?pid=9902

It's probably too wide (I don't know the dimensional specifications of the PCIe slots), but something similar. There are other tools you could use, but that's the method I'd personally feel most comfortable using.

This is probably the exact one I'd use:
http://www.dremel.com/en-us/Attach [...] px?pid=569

I knew someone around here had delved into this issue, I should have known chookman would be that guy.